Microsoft to Lay Off 7,800 Employees 'Primarily' in its Phone Business

[rcosby]

Microsoft is on shaky ground when you start looking long term. Up to this point, Microsoft products have been mostly half ass and a me-too approach. Look at their Antivirus solution. It's in last place for detection and security which begs to question of why have an offering at all? Why waste resources on half ass implementations? Microsoft needs to trim down to a small product and service offering then dedicate resources into making them top notch.

When you look at the current generation, everyone is now growing up on Apple and Google products and services. These folks will be the next CIOs and CTOs which means there is a good chance they won't choose Microsoft at all for their tech needs.

I disagree. I think that their long term outlook is excellent. You picked a few consumer products and made a judgement based on those. If they shut down all of their consumer products it would be a fraction of their real business which is business and enterprise and that business just keeps getting better. Azure is certainly a success as is O365, hosted exchange, Server tools, etc. There are some great MS products out there that keep getting better.

 

[rcosby]

There is a viable third OS, it's called Ubuntu phone. You folks in the USA in your pursuit of the latest and greatest and fastest do not realize there are a billion users waiting for the phone they can dock and use as a computer. Their criteria is it must be affordable, and it just needs to work.

There is no money outside the G-20 for people to buy both a computer and a smartphone. And soon for many in the G-20 as well.

The A-7 chip was called desktop class. The technology is here, it's just that apple and Microsoft and Intel don't want to cut their own throats by introducing it. The iPhone 4S is more smartphone than 90% of the world needs for the next 5 years. But living in a country where you cannot walk into a retail store and test drive a Linux machine, what I am writing about is invisible to you.

I have been a huge Ubuntu fan since it's inception and a Debian fan for years before that. That said, I'm certainly not going to hold my breath for this one any more than betting that this will be the year for linux on the desktop. I think that I first heard that back in the late 90s..

 

[JohnWick]

Microsoft has done a whole lot of complex code changing of the past few years and starting with Vista - Win 8. With Windows 10 because of the code can run on Intel processors as well as ARMs. So this means that the same OS code expands across many devices and form factors as never before and work efficiently base on the quality of the code. This then allows Microsoft to need less people and are shading the excess which they have been doing prior. The phone is just another area that they can cut excess of personnel because it's just not needed however in the light of this, I wish Microsoft would not cut personnel when they can add them the new devices division and let them run separate like the Xbox. I don't believe in cutting folks jobs especially when they are skilled.

 

[s2mikey]

its an unfortunate practice that kind of has to be done.

Foreseeable problem with just, re-assigning from within, is how do you determine which of those 7800 get what jobs? what if you only have room for 3,000 of those. and 6,000 are technically qualified? how do you avoid the arguments of nepotism or favouritism? Or perhaps accusations of something more evil and nefarious, for those particular 3k to keep their jobs while everyone else is let go?

its not the easiest, nor cheapest prospect, but firing all of them, and then making them re-apply for other jobs through the open market, helps alleviate that, at least a little.

it also lets those departments choose who they think is a best fit from those candidates, instead of arbitrarily assigning someone just because they're already employed in another department.

it sucks. And I wish that in the first place nobody had to get fired. But I do see why corporations go through this process.

I think part of the problem, or maybe most of the problem is that those that made the poor decisions in the first place never end up losing their job over this stuff. It'd be one thing if layoffs were more evenly distributed at companies but they never seem to be. That's the CEO rub for many people... They get paid HUGE no matter what happens. And if they do get let go, they walk away with incredibly fabulous parting gifts which seems completely unfair.

It seems that the risk with companies is taken on fully by low level workers or even mid level workers. The big cats get "theirs" regardless of how things go. If it goes good, they get paid. If it goes bad they get paid. The workers? Always hanging on by a thread and rarely get to have any say or have any control over their well being.

No one, me included, bemoans people making big money WHEN they've truly EARNED it. Just be nice to see the "right" heads roll more often when terrible decisions are made. Perhaps I'm jaded because I work for a company that used to be a giant super power and was run into the ground by idiots. These idiots were raking in cash right up until the last minute while thousands of people lost their livelihoods. Hard to watch and fathom.

 

[Rogifan]

yeah Rogi,

people are going to be angry cause 7800 jobs lost will hurt. People are going to hurt for this and they need someone to point the finger at.

But I do agree, Nadella is doing a good job at undoing the mess that Ballmer was doing. he was chasing markets he didn't understand. He let quality control slip tremendously in many product categories and he seemed to want to make Microsoft into some hybrid combination of business practices by both Google and Apple (Goopple?)

Microsoft was still a very very profitable company under him, but many people (people in the know from Microsoft) believe they could be where Apple is today if it weren't for him

Well I've always seen Microsoft as more of an enterprise company. But some of the diehards hate that and equate it to becoming IBM. Just because you're more focused on business as a company doesn't make you IBM. What I still don't get is why Microsoft went through this "One Microsoft" "devices and services" Ballmer reorg and bought Nokia's phone business and then shortly after got rid of Ballmer. Basically the new guy had to follow a strategy he didn't set or spend all his time undoing it (which is what Nadella has done).

 

[LordVic]

Well I've always seen Microsoft as more of an enterprise company. But some of the diehards hate that and equate it to becoming IBM. Just because you're more focused on business as a company doesn't make you IBM. What I still don't get is why Microsoft went through this "One Microsoft" "devices and services" Ballmer reorg and bought Nokia's phone business and then shortly after got rid of Ballmer. Basically the new guy had to follow a strategy he didn't set or spend all his time undoing it (which is what Nadella has done).

I think it was just mostly Ballmer's issue. he was a business man, not really a "visionary". its hard to tell

have a few friends working there, and internally, they hated Ballmer

 

[LordVic]

I think part of the problem, or maybe most of the problem is that those that made the poor decisions in the first place never end up losing their job over this stuff. It'd be one thing if layoffs were more evenly distributed at companies but they never seem to be. That's the CEO rub for many people... They get paid HUGE no matter what happens. And if they do get let go, they walk away with incredibly fabulous parting gifts which seems completely unfair.

It seems that the risk with companies is taken on fully by low level workers or even mid level workers. The big cats get "theirs" regardless of how things go. If it goes good, they get paid. If it goes bad they get paid. The workers? Always hanging on by a thread and rarely get to have any say or have any control over their well being.

No one, me included, bemoans people making big money WHEN they've truly EARNED it. Just be nice to see the "right" heads roll more often when terrible decisions are made. Perhaps I'm jaded because I work for a company that used to be a giant super power and was run into the ground by idiots. These idiots were raking in cash right up until the last minute while thousands of people lost their livelihoods. Hard to watch and fathom.

oh yeah, this is a bad corporate ethics policy of western business.

CEO screws up? sure, he might eventually be replaced, but the cost to do so is astronomical. They've all negotiated such insane "buyout" contracts that its' extremely costly. unfortunately, the peopel who will suffer for that cost is almost always the front line employees. It's easier, cheaper to fire 1000 employees who work the lines, than it is toreplace that one CEO who has a $100m buyout.

Case in point was BlackBerry. After Assigning Thorstein Heinz to CEO position, he was clearly unable to handle the job and turn around the company. he made terrible decision after terrible decision and paid nothing but lip service.

Why did it take so long to get rid of him? because his contract stated that the moment he was let go he would receive a tremendous amount of money from stock sell off.

They basically had to wait till the stock was low enough so that he only received $55million from it instead of the original $100 or so million

This is not a universally accepted practice outside of western society. Look at Nintendo for example. last couple years when Nintendo was having financial issues and wasn't succesfull, The CEO and executive all publicly took tremendous pay cuts in order to NOT impact their workers. They got up and took direct responsibility for their failures and admitted that it was them

It comes down to why they're in that position in the first place. Japan puts a lot of emphasis on pride behind work. Western puts a lot of empashis on monetary reward for work.

 

[revelated]

I think by and large the real issue was Ballmer's failure to recognize what he had available. It's not just Nokia. Nokia was a casualty. Let's look farther back than that.

The T-Mobile Sidekick was, at one time, THE device to have. It was the original cloud-based provider device. That OS was a bit clunky, but when Microsoft bought out Danger, I really don't understand why they didn't just improve on what was there. Instead, they butchered the Danger OS and released the Kin. I have NO idea who thought this was going succeed.

The Zune was actually a fantastic music player but failed on so many fronts. No Bluetooth? Really? And the name was silly to boot. Just like Kin.

When you put the Windows Mobile OS, Danger OS, Zune OS, Web OS (which Microsoft passed on for some reason) and Nokia together, you have a recipe for what could have really been an amazing device. One that had decently good hardware, and an operating system made up of, at the time, pieces and parts of the best competition Apple had. Yet they squandered it in favor of doing their own thing - just like with Windows RT, another failure that made no sense.

Ballmer had slight vision in that he saw applications on the mobile side, but not enough vision to do anything about it.